Photographing flowers

Weekend. Bliss. Not because there is an onerous day job to escape from (but yes we did start clearing out the basement of 13 years of accumulating). But because this has stopped.

Dismantling a three foot thick wall of stone to make a door.

Remember that huge expanse of lovely stone? (Course you do, it was only last week!) The old external wall of the house in the west?

It has to be become a portal to link the rest of our home. And that means one main bedroom will have a thick heavy oak door to bring you to the new office. And laundry.

If you are anywhere in the vicinity it feels like you are in a devilish dentist’s waiting room and the sound of the drill is permeating under every door. I’m starting to have phantom filling pain in sympathy with the poor house.

Etienne is wielding the drill. And he has very kindly explained they will only break through on Monday when we (and our furniture, soft furnishings, paintings, accumulations) have left the bedroom that abuts this wall.

Judging by the state of him, the dust from that much rubble is impressive. He took to hosing himself down every hour or so out in the courtyard just to stop from looking like he fell into a giant powder puff.

And hefting the rocks out…

Those rocks scream ‘stone steps’ to me. I do love a bit of recycling. But I don’t dare broach the subject just now.

Bebere, our other lovely builder looked in at one stage and muttered ‘well, at least there is mortar between the stones’. None of us know when this wall was put up. But it certainly wasn’t in the last two hundred years. The mortar isn’t right; it’s the consistency of sand. But it’s there. And coating everything in sight.

So I am hiding. And that means trying to get into the garden early before the heat melts everything and me.

And then I have snuck indoors when it’s too vile out. In the guest house. Far enough away not to hear the most pernicious of the drilling.

I have been wielding a paint brush and dipping into a paint pot. Or ten.

That’s what happens when you start a major sorting of your cavernous basement. I have found the most embarrassing collection of sample pots of paint.

And finding it tahsome to lie on the floor of our hallway to snap shots against the chestnut front door… I bought big sheets of plasterboard and painted them in Farrow and Ball tester pots.

And here are the results. The one that works best (I think) is Hague Blue. That’s the middle panel.

Pitch Blue looks great on a wall but not as the background I hoped.

I do love the Bone.

The others are a bit electric (Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue is way out there) and the green Citrine is too sickly.

But it’s fun. And I have stacked the boards up against the guesthouse so I don’t even have a trip hazard in the hallway anymore.

And it will ‘force’ me to be more disciplined about snapping shots of my Wednesday bouquets. Seven are going to the market each week. And they are ephemeral fripperies, but fun.